Got root? Smart users of phones have it. And that’s for a good reason. Rooting can make your smartphone faster, better, and its battery last longer. But that’s not all. Because Android is an open system, it allows you to modify any device it runs on, giving you full flexibility to customize the phone exactly to your specific needs.
But what is rooting anyways? When you use a smartphone, you are only given access to the surface of things such as the user interface while navigating the phone. As soon as you are trying to make changes on a system level, Android is there to protect you from potentially harming your phone and denies access. However, having full control on a system level is absolutely necessary to unlock its full potential. The rooting process is straight forward but you have to make sure that you’re following the details. If you haven’t rooted your phone yet, see whether your phone model is covered in the
AndroidRootz rooting section. Once you’ve successfully rooted your mobile, you can take advantage of the many awesome features that the Android world has to offer.
Reason 1: Remove Unwanted Apps
When carriers brand a smartphone and put a bunch of their own apps on the device (often to try to get you to sign up for something), this is referred to as bloatware. If you’re not using those apps, then they take away space and may slow down performance unnecessarily. Who wants apps that we didn’t personally select anyway. The problem with bloatware is that it often cannot be uninstalled from your mobile unless you have rooted it and are using special apps that have the ability to remove them on a system level. The root app called NoBloat takes care of this task and completely uninstalls any app you select. Beware though, if you remove apps that are necessary for the phone to function, it may stop working. That’s why it’s always important to have a full system backup (called Nandroid backup) so that you can restore the phone to a working state. This way you can try to uninstall one app after another until you’ve stripped the phone from all unwanted applications. A less extreme way of removing these apps is to freeze and then hide them. This forces them to not take away energy from the processor and makes them invisible. The app Titanium Backup does exactly that.
Reason 2: Create Full System Backups
Unlike a regular backup, which only backs up your Google’s basic data such as Contacts, a full system backup takes a complete snapshot of everything that’s on your smartphone. In the rooting world this is called a
Nandroid backup. The app ROM Manager is one of the best tools out there to create these types of backups. After you’ve created a Nandroid backup, you can always restore your phone to exactly the point when you’ve created it. So if something goes wrong, you can be rest assured that you can recover your device by restoring from a Nandroid backup.
Reason 3: Make Your Phone Faster
What is the fastest smartphone on the market? This one question has the Tech world captivated. But regardless of the device you have chosen, there are always ways to make things run faster. One way to increase the speed significantly with which your device runs is to overclock it. Overclocking means that you are forcing the phone to run above the threshold at which the manufacturer has fixed the phone’s processor to run. Every processor has actually more power available than advertised but there is a good reason why the manufacturer does not want you to use it: it drains the battery’s life. There is a way to overclock the phone while still preserving as much battery energy as possible. The overclocking app
SetCPUlets you create profiles so that you can choose during what activities your cell phone runs at overclocked speed and when it should reduce power to preserve battery life.
Reason 4: Back up Apps
When you download an app from the Google Play store, it gets automatically saved in the download history (open Google Play, tap the Menu key > My Apps). So if you need to reset your device or switch to another one, you could go back to “My Apps” and download the apps from there again. But this gets quite cumbersome considering the number of apps you’ve downloaded over time. Sorting through a long list is just not productive. Even worse, Google Play does not save all your app’s settings, including game scores. The solution: a root backup app that not only backs up the app but also all of its settings, and yes, including game scores. There are several of these apps available of which
Titanium Backup currently takes the lead.
Reason 5: Get Firmware Updates Ahead of Time
The one thing that most Android fans complain about is that companies do not update the firmware fast enough. In fact, unless your device is a flagship model, chances are that there won’t be any updates at all. Firmware updates come with the latest features, maybe a better look, and usually deliver an improved performance. Thanks to Android being an open system, the developer community often takes the lead on releasing firmware versions, referred to as custom ROMs, based on the very latest Android firmware. So if the manufacturer doesn’t update your phone or is otherwise just too slow, consider putting a custom ROM on your mobile. There is one custom ROM in particular that’s notorious for releasing firmware shortly after Google has released an Android update: CyanogenMod. Visit their
websiteto make sure that your device is supported and give it a try. Some of the CyanogenMod releases are also
covered here on AndroidRootz.
About the Author: Mark Galaxy
This is a guest post by Mark Galaxy, who is a writer for Android Tips, Tricks & Hacks and the creator of
